g with the
white milk. And she took up the fine nice milk and drank, because she
had loved me well once, she that loved me yet but feared--the coward,
the soft, soft, white coward that would lie on another man's heart
after I had keeled her for myself. Ay, she took up the milk and drank,
and I took my ways, and they came running to Glen Darruach to tell me
she had died.

"Oh, oh! the dark, the dark, and never more the sun shining on the
bonny blooms of dark Darruach, never mair the white lambs running, and
the gleam on the wing of the moorcock.

"Ay, they would be for the killing of me, and I lay among the rafters,
under the thatch of my mother's house, and listened to them miscalling
me, the black killer--the bloody man that had the black art and the
evil eye; and it came over my heart to catch them by the hair, and pull
them up to me as they were speaking, and let my black knife kiss their
hearts. It was all red, red before me, up there under the thatch, and
them down below, and my sisters shaking when they saw me watching down
in the dark. It's droll, droll--because a soft white coward died--they
would kill me, me that would kill a man when I drew my dirk--ho, ho, ho!

"I lay hid among the rocks above the Herring Slap, alane day and night,
and the blue rockdoos left their nestlings and circled above my lair,
till I was feart that folk wid see them, and come peering down and get
me. But a herrin' skiff took me away from that place in the dark of
the night, and I drifted to the warm South Seas and the darkling women
and the white glistening houses; but she came with me, she that had
died. I would be seeing her rising before the bows o' the ship, rising
from the sea, and waving on me to follow, and the weather was worse and
worse at her every coming. An' there was a man o' the Western Isles in
the crew, and he had the sight, and would be telling o' the woman
rising from the sea, and her hair blowing over the yeast o' the waves,
and her eyes staring, staring, and the waving of her hand when I was at
the tiller; and so bad the weather got, and the sickness among the
crew, that the captain swore he would send the woman's man to her, and
he lay aft in his cabin, and drank rum till his boy was feart to
venture near him; and then he came on deck--a fine wild man, all in his
finery o' lace and golden earrings, and he called his sailors aft to
make choice of the woman's man. There was many there that would have
been